Yahoo! Small Business Review – Is It a Right eCommerce Solution?

“We make ecommerce easier than ever” is a publicity slogan of Yahoo Small Business when releasing its ecommerce packages. Until now, a large number of webmasters have chosen one of the packages offered by Yahoo Small Business as an ecommerce solution. However, there are still many people who are hesitated to choose it because they do not know whether the ecommerce solution offered by the company is as preferable as it claims.

After a long time of studying Yahoo Small Business and applying its ecommerce solution for trial, we finally accomplished the following full-scale review covering its ecommerce platform’s pricing, site design, product catalog, payment processing and more.

Pricing

Yahoo Small Business offers 3 main ecommerce packages with different prices. Specifically, Starter, suitable for new businesses, charges $10.95/mo. Standard, aiming to serve for growing businesses, charges $25.95/mo. Professional, suitable for established businesses, charges $254.95/mo. However, these promotional prices are only available for the first 12 months, which means the prices will be range from $39.95/mo to $299.95/mo after the period.

Besides, except the former ones, Professional charges additional $50 setup fee. Moreover, all of the packages include respectively 1.5%, 1% and 0.75% transaction fee. Also, there are some charged services like search marketing on Yahoo Bing Network. As for the limitation of monthly sales, they allow respectively less than $12k, $12k to $80k and more than $80k in monthly sales.

Site Design

Yahoo offers many tools to help you with site setup and design. To be specific, you are able to use the convenient wizard in the setup process and select proper template to customize your site. Also, you have access to use wizard to create pages that are search engine friendly, and then specialize the page content to enhance attraction in the search engine results.

Moreover, there are also some third-party software, including Adobe GoLive, Adobe Dreamweaver and HTML editing tool, to assist you to create and design your site with ease. Besides, if you raise more requirements and have more budgets, you can have an expert in the Developer Network to work with you to create a custom site.

Product Catalog

Yahoo Small Business is dedicated to offering many easy-to-use tools for an effective product management. In detailed, its wizard and bulk-transfer options are approachable for you to add unlimited products covering downloadable goods and upload product information to your site. Moreover, you are able to create a detailed catalog of all products by creating various descriptions like size, color and price.

As for tracking product inventory, Yahoo Small Business allows you to set an alert of low quantities to notify you. At the same time, if you purchase Standard or Professional, you have access to the integration of inventory-management systems like StoneEdge and OrderMotion, which is helpful for you to track data across sales channels.

Checkout and Payment

The solution supports one-page or multi-page checkout in the shopping cart which automatically calculates tax and discount. It also allows you to offer you customer some friendly services like gift wrapping and message options. Moreover, you can set a registered or a guest checkout option for customers. Also, you have the ability to allow all register shoppers to check the status of their orders or order history.

Unlike some good open source solutions like PrestaShop, the ecommerce solution only supports 6 payment methods covering Discover, American Express, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and BillMeLater. Moreover, it supports credit card payment via merchant account. Furthermore, if you want to have FDMS payment gateway services with no additional fee, you have to own a merchant account. Additional, it enables you to quickly set up shipping methods including FedEx, UPS and FedEX.

Marketing and Reporting

Since you are in the middle of fiercely completive ecommerce environment, it is quite sensible and reasonable for you to map out efficient marketing strategies. As for this aspect, this ecommerce solution allows you to integrate your site with Yahoo Search, Google and Bing with some fees. In addition, you are able to offer your customer lots of appealing services like free shipping, coupons and discounts.

Data Driven Recommendations from the Live Web Insights is a plus of Yahoo Small Business. To be specific, it is very helpful to optimize marketing and promote sales. In the meantime, the solution gives you access to place your products on Twitter and Facebook. Besides, the grand-opening email is also reachable for you to keep contact with consumers. As for reporting, this ecommerce platform only provides very limited information of sales activity.

Conclusion

For what we have discussed above, we are able to conclude that the ecommerce solution offered by Yahoo Small Business is generally a good one among the emerging ecommerce platforms. However, the solution is considered to be expensive for hosting small online stores due to the high transacion fee, limited sales and many additional fees.

Therefore, if you want a more money-saving and more cost-effective way to assist your small online business, it is sensible for you to purchase a shared web hosting package and install the preferable open-source ecommerce software. In below, we have selected some leading web hosts which offer top-level ecommerce web hosting services.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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